Perhaps Styling Could Fill the Time

property stagingI just get so bored hanging round the house, sometimes. I say sometimes because there are other times when I’m completely engrossed in Week of Our Lives. It’s very engrossing! And then there are the times when I’m just head over heels for Next Door People, and if not that it becomes House and Not There. But in those moments in between I just tend to wander around, maybe feed the horses, have a choir brought in from the city to sing to me, go out on the jet-ski, lounge around on the beach, have a ski slope set up on the grounds and slide down a few times, go for a helicopter ride, host a diner party, host a tea party or just hop in the buggy and visit the family burial ground down by the lake.

It’s rather empty. I had Margaretta over yesterday, and SHE said she’s filling in her time with a bit of property staging. Her husband Fitzroy is a bit of a property mogul, like my Percy, and she helps him out by going to people’s houses and telling them what they need to do to sell the place at its maximum value. Things like replacing the curtains in the drawing room and installing a new security system on the gates that includes retinal scans instead of just boring old fingerprint. Sounds terribly exciting! I’m well into my soaps, but Margaretta has always gravitated towards the renovation shows. You know, Banned Design (where people try to add illegal things to their houses, like laser tripwires), Ann Tique’s Road Show (about that nice lady Ann who busks on her local high street every day for a living) and Vocation, Vacation, Vocation, the show about people going on holidays that are far too expensive for their budget and job and how they struggle to make ends meet after they get back.

Not really my thing, but Margaretta has gotten all her property styling knowledge from watching them nonstop. I know for a fact that Percy works with property stylists, because he has meetings and…well, it’s to do with property. He has fingers in ALL those pies. So, is Melbourne’s home styling industry ready for one more? I’m sure Percy could make it happen. Anything but staying bored!

-Cecelia

Property styling brings sales

When we first bought this house it was extremely run down. None of the plumbing worked and a few of the walls had gaping holes in them. It was definitely a fixer-upper, and fix up we did! We decided to do most of the work ourselves to cut down costs. It was fairly extreme DIY but Rob is very handy with a drill and I know my way around the grouting. The process was fairly stressful, we had our fair share of arguments and a couple of cuts and scrapes too, from the building work not from each other. So now, two years later we are preparing to sell the place. This time we are letting the professionals guide us, Rob has hired a property staging company based in Melbourne to come in and make our house look ‘buyable’.

It really is a shame we have to sell the place, if we had been a little more careful with our budget during the renovations we have may been able to afford to stay here. It seemed at the time it was best to go the extra mile and make everything perfect but perhaps if it had been just less than perfect we’d be able to enjoy it. The good thing is we should be making an unbelievable profit on the place, especially if the property stylist can maximise the selling value by the percentage he thinks he can! Although I like our spin on the decor, apparently it doesn’t appeal to the mass market. The stylists are bringing in lots of warm tones and curved surfaces. We do live in a pretty vanilla neighbourhood and our out-there style has never gone do so well. When I cut the hedges out front into celestial shapes most of the neighbours complained that it didn’t fit in the with the ‘street-look’. They liked it even less when I then trimmed the hedges into various human anatomies. Let’s just say I had a lot of parents complaining about their kids asking a lot of questions.